J.P. (Jacob Porter), Global Director of Product & Field Marketing, Edge by Ascential
“Working remotely has made me a bit self-conscious because I’m holed away in my kids’ toy room, but this has actually broken down some professional barriers. After all, we’re all working from homes.”
“[Customers] do not want to listen to you posturing about your product; rather, they want you to focus on their specific pain points and show them how to solve a real problem right now.”
In-person events were the core of our field marketing programs. We ran several industry trade shows and attended many other shows as a vendor, demonstrating our wares and talking shop. In the past couple of years, businesses have been forced to justify their return on investment in sending
people to trade shows, and we saw a push toward quality events over the number of events. We also started hosting events ourselves, focusing on user groups, best practices, and professional development.
We tried many variations on the formula to see what worked best. Some were for our own marketing; others were in partnership with other organizations. We had an event series that garnered a cult following, so we turned it into a ten-part digital series in the United Kingdom and a five-part series in the United States. The series offered different aspects of a topic and drilled down into the funnel, as well. We were surprised at the number of RSVPs and were looking at a new platform to host the sheer number of people. We saw that going digital with events was not an impossible hill to climb.
At the end of last year, we conducted a major survey and found that the trend was shifting back toward larger trade shows. For this year, we planned more speaking events, road show events, industry meetups, and other face-to-face events with our core customer base. We did not plan these events to be as intimate as a hosted dinner; rather, the goal was to take the best of small and large events and keep the numbers under a hundred or so. We were actually getting away from digital because it was “cold” and hard to fit into time zones.
This is an excerpt from 15 Experts on Reimagining Field Marketing. The eBook was generously sponsored by Mighty Guides.
